Treatment in Australia
Many types of treatment are available in Australia, aiming to reduce the risk of harm associated with drug use through services such as counselling, withdrawal management, rehabilitation, support and case management or information and education. For a subset of people who use alcohol and drugs, treatment and support will be required over the course of their life (consistent with dependence being a chronic condition, like asthma or diabetes). In many cases, people may require ongoing support to achieve long-term change. For other people, early support and treatment will be sufficient to reduce harms and prevent the need for further treatment or they may access treatment intermittently as required (Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care 2019).
In 2024–25:
- A total of 244,411 treatment episodes were provided to people for their own or someone else’s alcohol or drug use.
- Treatment episode numbers increased by 18% since 2015–16 (206,395) and rose by 1.4% compared to last year (240,958 in 2023–24).
- This could be due to some clients returning for 2 or more episodes of treatment, especially in Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory.
- Clients received an average of 1.9 treatment episodes nationally.
What are the treatment types?
In 2024–25:
- Counselling continued to be the most common main treatment type, making up almost one third (32%) of all treatment episodes, followed by assessment only (21%) and support and case management (18%).
- For people receiving treatment for their own alcohol or drug use, one third (33%) of episodes were for counselling and almost one quarter (23%) were for an assessment only, which continues to rise.
- For people who received support for someone else’s drug use, half (50%) of the episodes were for support and case management and about one quarter (24%) were for counselling, which is a decrease from last year (35%) (Figure 1).
